1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a relay device, a relay method, and a computer program product.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the era of SaaS (software as a service), it will become common to transmit large volumes of data via a network, process the data in a cloud across the network, and wait for a result of the data processing to be returned. However, network speed is a bottleneck, and a response time for a service, such as the reception of a processing result, may be long. There is data to show that a user's acceptable response time for a Web service is 4 seconds, so a system needs to return a response as quickly as possible. As a technology to meet such a need, it is well known that for example, like a cache of a proxy server, already-acquired data is stored in a relay device so as to quickly respond when targeted information is found in the cache.
Furthermore, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H11-143759 discloses a proxy server cache system in which a proxy server, which includes a cache and is connected to a wide area network, is connected to one or more clients, which each include a cache and a World Wide Web browser operates therein, via a local area network. In this system, when data to be displayed on a World Wide Web browser of one client does not exist in the cache of the proxy server, the data can be retrieved from the cache of another client and displayed on the World Wide Web browser.
In a conventional caching mechanism of a proxy server as described above, it can be expected, for example, that the response speed with respect to a static file, such as an image file, is improved; however, the response speed of a processing result of large-volume data in a cloud cannot be expected to be improved. Furthermore, the same goes for the above-described system disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H11-143759.